Adventure Magazine Cover — page 59: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Third Mate truding, the face convulsed on the instant with the agony of sudden death. The third savage came along after the second, but when he saw his companion ly- ing dead on the deck he took fright, uttered one screech, and ran forward where he skulked in the obscurity. The white man dragged himself up on deck. He looked at the stars and breathed deeply of the night air. The cool breeze against his naked body felt like a benison from heaven. He sat cross-legged on the deck and called softly to the lad in the rigging. “Come down, you Portygee!’’ he said. “Come down. I’ve saved your bacon.” There were voices calling back and forth in the night, the Portuguese in a parley with the boats, trying to get the crew to come aboard. Clough, faint and giddy from pain and blood-letting, heard the voices out there on the water, the men cursing the Sharon, swearing they would never board her. Only one shot had been fired—there were two | niggers left, they averred. That was too many. They were a nice lot of sheep! After half an hour of this sort of thing, after the third mate had lost enough blood to have killed an ordinary man, they came in, fearful, and swarmed over the side. The Portuguese fetched a lantern; they saw what a fight there had been—how the third mate had turned the trick. Their joy was great, their ferocity unbounded. At this exhibition of retaking the ship, the 815 skulker forward jumped into the sea and swam away into the night. Presently he returned under cover of the confusion and hid himself in the forehold. Here his move- ments attracted attention and he was dragged out and clapped into irons. He was tried afterward in New South Wales for mutiny and murder, and it went hard with him. They now heard the heathen in the cabin, who had not been quite killed, making a fin- ish of it with a great deal of groaning and rolling about. One of the crew seized a cutting-spade, another possessed himself of a musket, and they ran below. Having inordinately finished a job that had been well enough done in the first place, they dragged the body on deck. The sharks had a feast. ‘The fellow who had met his death at the point of the musket went the same way. In the morning light the ship showed a ghastly spectacle, the deck and cabin floor all dappled and tracked with blood—the headless body of the Captain. ““VYe’re a brave lad, Clough,” said the mate, when they laid the third mate in his bunk, ‘‘and it’ll go in the log.” It was in 1845 that the Sharon came back to port. The story of Clough’s fidelity went straight to the ears of Gibbs & Jenney, her owners; and the next time the old whaler stuck her stubby forefoot outside of Buzzard’s Bay the third mate was her master, COmiclbook (©